Compare methods

	Delphi Method for Strategy Foresight	Strategic Scenario Planning
Field	Strategic Management	Strategic Management
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1975	1995
Originator	Harold Linstone & Murray Turoff; Gene Rowe & George Wright	Pierre Wack; Paul Schoemaker; Kees van der Heijden
Type	Iterative structured expert-elicitation process for foresight	Structured foresight process for strategy under deep uncertainty
Seminal source	Linstone, H. A., & Turoff, M. (Eds.). (1975). The Delphi Method: Techniques and Applications. Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 9780201042948	Schoemaker, P. J. H. (1995). Scenario Planning: A Tool for Strategic Thinking. Sloan Management Review, 36(2), 25-40.
Aliases	Corporate Delphi Foresight, Strategic Expert-Panel Forecasting, Policy Delphi for Strategy, Iterative Expert Elicitation for Foresight	Intuitive-Logics Scenario Method, Scenario-Based Strategic Planning, Strategic Foresight Scenarios, Shell-Style Scenario Planning
Related	4	4
Summary	The Delphi method is a structured process for combining the judgments of a panel of experts on questions where hard data are scarce - long-range forecasts, emerging technologies, and strategic uncertainties - through several rounds of anonymous response and controlled feedback. Linstone and Turoff's 1975 collection The Delphi Method: Techniques and Applications established the canonical design and its variants, including the policy Delphi used to explore strategic options rather than to pin down a single estimate. Rowe and Wright's 1999 International Journal of Forecasting review distilled the evidence on what makes Delphi work, identifying anonymity, iteration, controlled statistical feedback, and aggregation of the final round as the procedure's defining features. In strategy and corporate foresight, Delphi is used to forecast technology timelines, prioritize uncertainties, and build expert consensus to inform long-horizon decisions.	Strategic scenario planning is a structured foresight method that helps organizations make decisions under deep uncertainty by constructing a small set of internally consistent, sharply divergent stories about how the future could unfold. The dominant 'intuitive-logics' tradition was pioneered at Royal Dutch/Shell by Pierre Wack, whose 1985 Harvard Business Review account showed how scenarios prepared Shell's managers for the 1973 oil shock by changing how they perceived their world rather than by predicting it. Paul Schoemaker's 1995 Sloan Management Review article codified the approach into a repeatable step-by-step process for managers, and Kees van der Heijden's 1996 book reframed scenarios as the centerpiece of an ongoing 'strategic conversation' through which an organization builds shared understanding and adaptive capacity. The aim is not to forecast a single future but to make strategy robust across several plausible ones.